Many people, including me, were not shocked by J.D. Salinger’s death Thursday. He was 91 and had been a recluse since the publication of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ But I somehow feel as if a part of literary history has now been folded and tucked away.

Since Salinger’s death was publicized, literary Web sites have been pulling out his early short stories such as ‘The Heart of a Broken Story’ and ‘This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,’ written before his only novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ became a national and cultural phenomenon after its 1951 publication.

I’ve always held this strange notion that great books immortalize their authors, but now with Salinger gone, the magic of reading ‘Catcher’ will have dissipated. Salinger himself became a man of myths, known for being extremely private and granting his last interview more than 30 years ago in 1980.

Since his passing Thursday, I’ve asked many of my friends to reminisce on their memories of when they first laid eyes on the novel. I was not surprised to find that there were polarizing views about Salinger’s distrustful protagonist, ranging from the feelings of ‘enamored, the book changed my 15-year-old self’ to ‘I still don’t get what the hype is all about.’

I guess I should be honest and say that I fall under the ‘enamored, book changed my life’ crowd. When a work has so much depth and contradiction to question the authority of a generation through the point of view of a cynical yet delicately idealistic 17-year-old, it’s reflective of the author’s own attention to detail of the world that surrounded him. ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ became the book that defined me when I was 15, in a time when I was still searching for my own identity and moving listlessly in a society that I felt I had no place in.

Adam Gopnik, a contributor for The New Yorker, writes, ‘Yet though he may seem to have chosen a hermit’s life, Salinger was no hermit on the page. And so his death throws us back from the myth to the magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm. … Salinger was an expansive romantic, an observer of the details of the world.’

Even through changing times, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the character Holden Caulfield have solidified themselves and become timeless. Those who first read the novel during adolescence still find the book prevalent enough to connect with, a swift reminder of the youth they once possessed.

Shane Dunn, a sophomore physics and math major, said that he thoroughly enjoyed the book when he first read it as a 14-year-old.

‘I thought it was the epitome of character development in a book,’ Dunn said. ‘Salinger portrayed Holden as the ultimate angst-y teenager complaining about the world when there was not much to complain about.’

I’ve always wanted to believe that Salinger concocted Holden as a version of himself, probably in hopes that the book had been an open portal for Salinger to divulge more about who he was through his works, rather than through interviews.

Nevertheless, those who did not enjoy Salinger’s novel found that Holden, coming from a privileged family, was too preachy. ‘Plot is in short supply. ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is a novel where not very much happens,’ said Finlo Rohrer of the BBC News Magazine.

John Sumpter, a junior international relations and Middle Eastern studies major, commented that the book was eye-opening, but Salinger never really delivered.

‘The book was good, and it was intriguing that his writing style was different from other authors at the time,’ Sumpter said. ‘But his actual writing wasn’t anything spectacular. I’ve read far greater books than that.’

Fans or not, one thing we can all agree on is the long influence Salinger and his works have made since their early publications.

As Gopnik of The New Yorker so eloquently put it, ‘But the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us.’

Angela Hu is a sophomore magazine journalism and English and textual studies major. Her column appears weekly, and she can be reached at ajhu01@syr.edu.

Published on January 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm